Facile synthesis of hierarchical CuO flowers with superior photocatalytic activity and supercapacitor performance

In this work, we are reporting a simplistic approach for the synthesis of copper oxide (CuO) flowers (CFs) by using chemical precipitation method. The physicochemical characterization of as-synthesized CFs has been carried by FE-SEM (field emission scanning electron microscopy), X-ray Diffraction (XRD), X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS), FT-IR (Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy, BET surface area and UV–Visible spectrophotometer. XRD results confirmed the monoclinic crystallization of CFs. Scanning electron micrograph (SEM) analysis revealed that as-synthesized CFs exhibits flower-like morphology and are uniformly fashioned exhibiting the high surface area of 72 m² g⁻¹. The as-synthesized CFs were further examined for their photocatalytic activities and supercapacitor (Sc) performance. The as-synthesized CFs were able to completely degrade the Rhodamine B (RhB) and Methylene blue (MB) dyes within merely 100 and 80 min, respectively. The electrochemical analysis demonstrated that CFs exhibit superior electrochemical properties with a high specific capacitance of 500.1 Fg⁻¹ at 5 mVs⁻¹ and an energy density (Ed) of 18.5 Whkg-1 with 96% capacity retention after 2000 cycles. Thus, the overall results of the present study suggest that CFs have extensive potential for photocatalytic activity and energy storage.